On 6 April 1868, the Meiji emperor proclaimed the Imperial Oath and ‘restored' the imperial rule, beginning the Meiji period (1868-1912).

At the time, the emperor was a mere 15 years old, so the royalists from southern domains, often of humble origin inside the samurai class, overthrew the Tokugawa government in his name.

To examine whether the Tokugawa or the Meiji government was more violent, one needs to define ‘violence'. If it is defined as physical violence such as war, torture and murder, the Meiji government may have been more violent than the Tokugawa, because, similar to other colonial governments in the West, it committed atrocities and acts of aggression both within and outside the empire, including the Civil War (1868-9), the Satsuma Rebellion (1877), the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5). Nonetheless, if the term includes structural violence, as defined by Johan Gultung, a sociology professor who founded the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, the evaluation may be more difficult, because structural violence includes poverty, hunger, and inequalities based on ethnicity, gender, nation­ality and religion.^[537] If one counts these latter forms of violence, one may conclude that Tokugawa Japan was as violent as its successor.

A comparison among the Meiji (1868-1912), Taisho (1912-25) and Showa (1925-89) periods in Japan yields troubling results.

While it is difficult to decide which period of the Japanese empire was more violent, violence in the empire was without doubt too abundant to list entirely. Nonetheless, it can be grouped as violence related to imperialism/ militarism, racism and sexism. This chapter details some of the specific examples in each category in order to demonstrate institutionalised violence committed by the state from the birth of the empire in 1868 to the end of its existence in 1945. The term ‘violence' in this chapter includes not only physical but also structural violence.